IP-Watch is a non-profit independent news service, and subscribing to our service helps support our goals of bringing more transparency to global IP and innovation policies. To access all of our content, please subscribe now. You also have the opportunity to offer additional support to your subscription, or to donate.

Journal articles by professors at the University of Kansas (US) will soon be freely available online, the school reported, as it becomes the first public university in the United States to embrace an “open access” policy.

“Academic publishing has become increasingly commercial and unavailable to other scholars, or to the general public, in recent years,” Townsend Peterson, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Kansas, said in the press release. This move will “represents a first step towards a new means of scholarly communication, in which the entire global academic community has access to the totality of scholarship,” he added.

Thanks to Thomas Hammond of the Commission for Environmental Cooperation for the tip.